Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

by Faulkner, William

  And there, as Uncle Gavin would say, was Ratliff again, sitting in the client’s chair with his blue shirt neat and faded and quite clean and still no necktie even though he was wearing the imitation leather jacket and carrying the heavy black policeman’s slicker which were his winter overcoat; it was Monday and Uncle Gavin had gone that morning over to New Market to the supervisors’ meeting on some more of the drainage canal business and I thought he would have told Ratliff that when Ratliff came to see him yesterday afternoon at home.

  “He might a mentioned it,” Ratliff said. “But it dont matter. I didn’t want nothing. I jest stopped in here where it’s quiet to laugh a little.”

  “Oh,” I said. “About I.O. Snopes’s mule that burned down Mrs Hait’s house. I thought you and Uncle Gavin laughed at that enough yesterday.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Because soon as you set down to laugh at it, you find out it aint funny a-tall.” He looked at me. “When will your uncle be back?”

  “I thought he would be back now.”

  “Oh well,” he said. “It dont matter.” He looked at me again. “So that’s two down and jest one more to go.”

  “One more what?” I said. “One more Snopes for Mr Flem to run out of Jefferson, and the only Snopes left will be him; or—”

  “That’s right,” he said. “—one more uncivic ditch to jump like Montgomery Ward’s photygraph studio and I.O.’s railroad mules, and there wont be nothing a-tall left in Jefferson but Flem Snopes.” He looked at me. “Because your uncle missed it.”

  “Missed what?” I said.

  “Even when he was looking right at it when Flem his—himself come in here the morning after them—those federals raided that studio and give your uncle that studio key that had been missing from the sheriff’s office ever since your uncle and Hub found them—those pictures; and even when it was staring him in the face out yonder at Miz Hait’s chimbley Saturday night when Flem give—gave her that mortgage and paid I.O. for the mules, he still missed it. And I cant tell him.”

  “Why cant you tell him?” I said.

  “Because he wouldn’t believe me. This here is the kind of a thing you—a man has got to know his—himself. He has got to learn it out of his own hard dread and skeer. Because what somebody else jest tells you, you jest half believe, unless it was something you already wanted to hear. And in that case, you dont even listen to it because you had done already agreed, and so all it does is make you think what a sensible feller it was that told you. But something you dont want to hear is something you had done already made up your mind against, whether you knowed—knew it or not; and now you can even insulate against having to believe it by resisting or maybe even getting even with that-ere scoundrel that meddled in and told you.”

  “So he wouldn’t hear you because he wouldn’t believe it because it is something he dont want to be true. Is that it?”

  “That’s right,” Ratliff said. “So I got to wait. I got to wait for him to learn it his—himself, the hard way, the sure way, the only sure way. Then he will believe it, enough anyhow to be afraid.”

  “He is afraid,” I said. “He’s been afraid a long time.”

  “That’s good,” Ratliff said. “Because he had purely better be. All of us better be. Because a feller that jest wants money for the sake of money, or even for power, there’s a few things right at the last that he wont do, will stop at. But a feller that come—came up from where he did, that soon as he got big enough to count it he thought he discovered that money would buy anything he could or would ever want, and shaped all the rest of his life and actions on that, trampling when and where he had to but without no—any hard feelings because he knowed—knew that he wouldn’t ask nor expect no—any quarter his—himself if it had been him—to do all this and then find out at last, when he was a man growed—grown and it was maybe already too late, that the one thing he would have to have if there was to be any meaning to his life or even peace in it was not only something that jest money couldn’t buy, it was something that not having money to begin with or even getting a holt of all he could count or imagine or even dream about and then losing it, couldn’t even hurt or harm or grieve or change or alter—to find out when it was almost too late that what he had to have was something that any child was born having for free until one day he growed—grew up and found out when it was maybe too late that he had throwed—thrown it away.”

  “What?” I said. “What is it he’s got to have?”

  “Respectability,” Ratliff said.

  “Respectability?”

  “That’s right,” Ratliff said. “When it’s jest money and power a man wants, there is usually some place where he will stop; there’s always one thing at least that ever—every man wont do for jest money. But when it’s respectability he finds out he wants and has got to have, there aint nothing he wont do to get it and then keep it. And when it’s almost too late when he finds out that’s what he’s got to have, and that even after he gets it he cant jest lock it up and set—sit down on top of it and quit, but instead he has got to keep on working with ever—every breath to keep it, there aint nothing he will stop at, aint nobody or nothing within his scope and reach that may not anguish and grieve and suffer.”

  “Respectability,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Ratliff said. “Vice president of that bank aint enough any more. He’s got to be president of it.”

  “Got to be?” I said.

  “I mean soon, that he dont dare risk waiting, putting it off. That girl of Miz Snopes’s—Linda. She’s going on—”

  “She’ll be nineteen the twelfth of April,” I said.

  “—nineteen now, over there—How do you know it’s the twelfth?”

  “That’s what Uncle Gavin says,” I said.

  “Sho, now,” Ratliff said. Then he was talking again. “—at the University at Oxford where there’s a thousand extry young fellers all new and strange and interesting and male and nobody a-tall to watch her except a hired dormitory matron that aint got no wife expecting to heir half of one half of Uncle Billy Varner’s money, when it was risky enough at the Academy right here in Jefferson last year before your uncle or her maw or whichever it was or maybe both of them together, finally persuaded Flem to let her quit at the Academy and go to the University after Christmas where he couldn’t his—himself supervise her masculine acquaintance down to the same boys she had growed—grown up with all her life so at least their folks might have kinfolk that owed him money to help handle them; not to mention having her home ever—every night where he could reach out and put his hand on her ever—every time the clock struck you might say. So he cant, he dassent, risk it; any time now the telegram or the telephone might come saying she had jest finished running off to the next nearest town with a j.p. in it that never give a hoot who Flem Snopes was, and got married. And even if he located them ten minutes later and dragged her—”

  “Drug,” I said.

  “—back, the—what?” he said.

  “Drug,” I said. “You said ‘dragged.’”

  Ratliff looked at me a while. “For ten years now, whenever he would stop talking hisself long enough that is, and for five of them I been listening to you too, trying to learn—teach myself to say words right. And, jest when I call myself about to learn and I begin to feel a little good over it, here you come, of all people, correcting me back to what I been trying for ten years to forget.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s because I like the way you say it. When you say it, ‘taken’ sounds a heap more took than just ‘took,’ just like ‘drug’ sounds a heap more dragged than just ‘dragged.’”

  “And not jest you neither,” Ratliff said. “Your uncle too: me saying ‘dragged’ and him saying ‘drug’ and me saying ‘dragged’ and him saying ‘drug’ again, until at last he would say, ‘In a free country like this, why aint I got as much right to use your drug for my dragged as you got to use my dragged for your drug?’”r />
  “All right,” I said. “‘Even if he drug her back.’”

  “—even if he drug—dragged—drug—You see?” he said. “Now you done got me so mixed up until even I dont know which one I dont want to say?”

  “‘—it would be too late and the damage—’” I said.

  “Yes,” Ratliff said. “And at least even your Uncle Gavin knows this; even a feller as high-and delicate-minded as him must know that the damage would be done then and Miz Snopes would quit Flem too and he could kiss good-bye not jest to her share of Uncle Billy’s money but even to the voting weight of his bank stock too. So Flem’s got to strike now, and quick. He’s not only got to be president of that bank to at least keep that much of a holt on that Varner money by at least being president of where Uncle Billy keeps it at, he’s got to make his lick before the message comes that Linda’s done got married or he’ll lose the weight of Uncle Billy’s voting stock.”

  SEVENTEEN

  GAVIN STEVENS

  At last we knew why he had moved his money. It was as a bait. Not putting it into the other bank, the old Bank of Jefferson, as the bait, but for the people of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County to find out that he had withdrawn his own money from the bank of which he himself was vice president, and put it somewhere else.

  But that wasn’t first. At first he was simply trying to save it. Because he knew no better then. His association with banks had been too brief and humble for the idea even to have occurred to him that there was a morality to banking, an inevictable ethics in it, else not only the individual bank but banking as an institution, a form of social behavior, could not endure.

  His idea and concept of a bank was that of the Elizabethan tavern or a frontier inn in the time of the opening of the American wilderness: you stopped there before dark for shelter from the wilderness; you were offered food and lodging for yourself and horse, and a bed (of sorts) to sleep in; if you waked the next morning with your purse rifled or your horse stolen or even your throat cut, you had none to blame but yourself since nobody had compelled you to pass that way nor insisted on your stopping. So when he realised that the very circumstances which had made him vice president of a bank had been born of the fact that the bank had been looted by an oaf with no more courage or imagination than he knew his cousin Byron to possess, his decision to remove his money from it as soon as he could was no more irrational than the traveller who, unsaddling in the inn yard, sees a naked body with its throat cut being flung from an upstairs window and re-cinches his saddle with no loss of time and remounts and rides on again, to find another inn perhaps or if not, to pass the night in the woods, which after all, Indians and bears and highwaymen to the contrary, would not be a great deal more unsafe.

  It was simply to save his money—that money he had worked so hard to accumulate, too hard to accumulate, sacrificed all his life to gather together from whatever day it had been on whatever wornout tenant farm his father had moved from, onto that other wornout one of old Will Varner’s at Frenchman’s Bend which nobody else except a man who had nothing would undertake, let alone hope, to wrest a living from—from that very first day when he realised that he himself had nothing and would never have more than nothing unless he wrested it himself from his environment and time, and that the only weapon he would ever have to do it with would be just money.

  Oh yes, sacrificed all his life for, sacrificed all the other rights and passions and hopes which make up the sum of a man and his life. Perhaps he would never, could never, have fallen in love himself and knew it: himself constitutionally and generically unfated ever to match his own innocence and capacity for virginity against the innocence and virginity of who would be his first love. But, since he was a man, to do that was his inalienable right and hope. Instead, his was to father another man’s bastard on the wife who would not even repay him with the passion of gratitude, let alone the passion of passion since he was obviously incapable of that passion, but merely with her dowry.

  Too hard for it, all his life for it, knowing at the same time that as long as life lasted he could never for one second relax his vigilance, not just to add to it but simply to keep, hang on to, what he already had, had so far accumulated. Amassing it by terrible and picayune nickel by nickel, having learned soon, almost simultaneously probably, that he would never have any other method of gaining it save simple ruthless antlike industry, since (and this was the first time he ever experienced humility) he knew now that he not only had not the education with which to cope with those who did have education, whom he must outguess and outfigure and despoil, but that he never would have that education now, since there was no time now, since his was the fate to have first the need for the money before he had opportunity to acquire the means to get it. And, even having acquired some of the money, he still had no place to put it down in safety while he did acquire the education which would enable him to defend it from those with the education who would despoil him of it in their turn.

  Humility, and maybe a little even of regret—what little time there was to regret in—but without despair, who had nothing save the will and the need and the ruthlessness and the industry and what talent he had been born with, to serve them; who never in his life had been given anything by any man yet and expected no more as long as life should last; who had no evidence yet that he could cope with and fend off that enemy which the word Education represented to him, yet had neither qualm nor doubt that he was going to try.

  So at first his only thought was to save that money which had cost him so dear, had in fact cost him everything since he had sacrificed his whole life to gain it and so it was his life, from the bank which his cousin had already proved vulnerable. That was it: a bank so vulnerable that someone like the one he himself knew his cousin Byron to be could have robbed it—an oaf without courage or even vision in brigandage to see further than the simple temptation of a few temporarily unguarded nickels and dimes and dollar bills of the moment, a feller, as Ratliff would have said, hardly bright enough to be named Snopes even, not even bright enough to steal the money without having to run immediately all the way to Texas before he could stop long enough to count it; having in fact managed to steal just about enough to buy the railroad ticket with.

  Because remember, he didn’t merely know that banks could be looted (vide his cousin Byron which he had witnessed himself), he believed, it was a tenet of his very being, that they were constantly looted; that the normal condition of a bank was a steady and decorous embezzlement, its solvency an impregnable illusion like the reputation of a woman who everybody knows has none yet which is intact and invulnerable because of the known (maybe proven) fact that every one of her male connections will spring as one man, not just to repudiate but to avenge with actual gunfire the slightest whisper of a slur on it. Because that—the looting of them—was the reason for banks, the only reason why anybody would go to the trouble and expense of organising one and keeping it running.

  That was what Colonel Sartoris had done (he didn’t know how yet, that was the innocence, but give him time) while he was president, and what Manfred de Spain would do as long as he in his turn could or did remain on top. But decently, with decorum, as they had done and would do: not reaved like a boy snatching a handful of loose peanuts while the vendor’s back was turned, as his cousin Byron had done. Decently and peacefully and even more: cleverly, intelligently; so cleverly and quietly that the very people whose money had been stolen would not even discover it until after the looter was dead and safe. Nor even then actually, since by that time the looter’s successor would have already shouldered the burden of that yet-intact disaster which was a natural part of his own heritage. Because, to repeat, what other reason was there to establish a bank, go to all the work and trouble to start one to be president of, as Colonel Sartoris had done; and to line up enough voting stock, figure and connive and finagle and swap and trade (not to mention digging into his own pocket—Ratliff always said De Spain borrowed some if not all of it on his personal not
e from old Will Varner—to replace the sum which Byron Snopes had stolen) to get himself elected president after the Colonel’s death, as Manfred de Spain had done: who—De Spain—would have to be more clever even than the Colonel had been, since he—De Spain—must also contrive to cover up the Colonel’s thievery in order to have any bank to loot himself.

  He didn’t—to repeat again—know how Colonel Sartoris had done it and how De Spain would continue to do it of course—how Colonel Sartoris had robbed it for twelve years yet still contrived to die and be buried in the odor of unimpugnable rectitude; and how De Spain would carry on in his turn and then quit his tenure (whenever that would be) not only with his reputation unimpaired but somehow even leaving intact that bubble of the bank’s outward solvency. Or not yet, anyway. Which may have been when he first really tasted that which he had never tasted before—the humility of not knowing, of never having had any chance to learn the rules and methods of the deadly game in which he had gauged his life; whose fate was to have the dreadful need and the will and the ruthlessness, and then to have the opportunity itself thrust upon him before he had had any chance to learn how to use it.

  So all he knew to do was to move his money out of the bank of which he was only vice president: not high enough in rank to rob it himself in one fell swoop which would net him enough to make it worthwhile fleeing beyond extradition for the rest of his life, nor even high enough in its hierarchy to defend himself from the inevitable next Byron Snopes who would appear at the bookkeeper’s desk, let alone from the greater hereditary predator who already ranked him.

  And then he had nowhere to put it. If he could withdraw it from his own bank in utter secrecy, with no one ever to know it, he could have risked hiding it in his house or burying it in the back yard. But it would be impossible to keep it a secret; if no one else, the very bookkeeper who recorded the transaction would be an automatic threat. And if word did spread that he had withdrawn his money from the bank in cash, every man and his cousin in the county would be his threat and enemy until every one of them was incontrovertibly convinced that the actual money actually was somewhere else, and exactly where that somewhere else was.